Computers

The Goldfarmer

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

Let’s imagine a hypothetical economy. It’s a bit of an odd economy, since it’s partly “virtual” and partly “real,” at least by conventional economic reasoning — but in a way, part of what I’m trying to show with this hypothetical example is that conventional economic reasoning’s binary of “virtual” versus “real” has inadequate explanatory force. Furthermore, that inadequacy carries strong implications for the economic aspects of students’ work in the composition classroom.

Note: a lot of the following might feel a lot more clear if read in the context of the excellent Cory Doctorow short story, “Anda’s Game.”

Let’s ground this hypothetical economy in the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game Everworld Galaxies of UltimaQuest. I write “ground” because the term “set” would imply that the economy is confined to the world bounded by the environment of EGOUQ, which — as will quickly become apparent — is not true: the game’s economy bursts the bounds of the “virtual” and spills over into the social “real.” And I know these scare quotes are gonna get irritating really quickly, but I hope you’ll bear with me: I’m using both terms, if I can be vulgarly Gallic, sous rature. Anyway: so we’ve got an economy, some aspects (we’ll call them “transactions”) of which take place in-game, others out-of-game. And the effects of those transactions cross that in-game/out-of-game boundary.

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Weblogs as Liminal Oscillation

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

While I work from a fairly strong cultural studies perspective, I’m finishing my dissertation in a graduate program with a rather significant and well-known intellectual inheritance from the work of Walker Gibson, Donald Murray, and Peter Elbow. I didn’t get as many questions about that as I might have anticipated when I was on the job market — most of the search committees seemed to have actually gone through my materials, which makes me more fortunate than some other folks I’ve talked to — but there were a few interviewers (no, not the one who was asleep) who blinked when I mentioned John Trimbur or Bruce Horner in relation to my research. Those of us in this graduate program well understand all the critiques of that so-called expressivist intellectual inheritance, and have often agreed with those critiques or proposed extensions of those critiques. Still, institutions shape perspectives, and my recent readings of some technical communication-oriented scholarship got me thinking about questions of perspective and value.

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Upgrading

preterite Computers

Just moved to WordPress 2.01. It’ll take a little while before everything’s back the way I like it, but I’m hoping it won’t give you all those problems we were having with posting and reposting comments. Let me know what works and doesn’t?

(Most important things on the agenda: getting recent comments to show up in the sidebar, putting the sidebar in proper order so links to recent comments are near the top, and — probably last — putting together a nice theme with lots of bright green, inky black, and bold sans-serif fonts.

Cause I love that green and black.)

Update: Things seem to be edging back to normal. Firefox misaligns the footer image by 1 pixel, and only on the main page and on post pages with comments — posts without comments seem fine, and no other browsers I’ve tried do the same thing, so I’m puzzled. Archives are broken, so I’ll have to check the WP support forum.

The FaceBook Storm

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Culture

On Tuesday, March 30, I’ll ask my students to read an introductory collection of essays that introduces the “Adding to a Conversation” essay, where they survey the breadth of research and discourse and written conversation (in academic journals, popular press, and elsewhere) on a topic of interest, attempt to find the lacunae and interstices in that conversation, and add their own perspectives. The current edition of the textbook that I helped our Writing Program to construct includes model or sample conversations about guns and school violence, censorship and youth culture, and debates about stem cell research and evolution. I’ll have left the program by the time next year when they start thinking about revising the textbook, but on March 30, I think I might test-run an initial unit of readings that focus on the recent two-month perfect storm of controversy swirling around the Facebook and notions of academic and pedagogical freedom and restraint, with an eye towards suggesting it as a possible addition to the textbook.

Student Life on the Facebook
Teens’ Bold Blogs Alarm Area Schools
Facebook Face-Off
Facebook Drama at SU
Of Free Speech and Student Materiality
When Journalists Attack!
Facebook, Online Student Networking, and Strategically Designed Student Selves

There are interesting subtle resonances, for me, with the things I’ve had to say about affectual labor and the commodification of identity, so I’ll be curious to see how it plays out and what my students’ reactions might be. Additionally, while I never, ever want to be the kind of teacher who requires his students to read his own texts, I wonder if there might be some way to get that article Casey and I did (if you want to make me happy, ask me for the link) on commodification and online identity in there, since it seems to be on (rather long) hold in terms of publication.

A Digital Working Class?

preterite Class (Meta), Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

In Cory Doctorow’s excellent short story “Anda’s Game” (which Michael Chabon included in the 2005 Best American Short Stories), a Tijuana labor organizer named Raymond explains to the title character that the missions she’s being hired to complete in a massively multiplayer online game similar to World of Warcraft are actually destroying the avatars of in-game sweatshop labor, who lose their (real) day’s wages when “killed.” Unfortunately, the scenario isn’t only fictional: such sweatshops actually do exist, and stand as remarkable evidence of the ways in which virtual online economies are increasingly intersecting with today’s “real” economy of individuated production and consumption — and having real and concrete effects on the ways people experience socioeconomic class.

Today’s individuated economy is making newly heightened demands on certain classes of people (the in-game sweatshop workers; the people holding down two jobs who take online higher education classes when they get home at night in the hopes of securing better employment) while opening up new opportunities for others (those who exploit the in-game sweatshop workers; the digerati who have the access and training to construct and manipulate new digital texts). So the immediate question to ask would seem to be: who are the new digital working classes, now that increasing efficiencies of production and the changing economy are reducing the ranks of such conventionally working-class occupations as machinists, farmers, and factory workers? Besides online in-game sweatshop workers, who else might we understand as being working class in the context of digital technologies — and how might composition pedagogies account for such people?

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Not Bodies

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

I’ve been quiet for a while. It’s taken me some working-through to put this post together, but it felt important enough to post as one long piece rather than a series of short reflections, as I hope might be apparent. What I’m trying to do here is set up a classroom context for how my revised formulation of class functions in the information economy, which is the focus of my dissertation’s chapter 4; as such, this post follows directly from my last one. Some of the ideas here are wobbly and underdeveloped, so if you’ve got the patience, I’d be grateful for feedback.

I concluded that last post with a reference to Clancy’s deployment of the feminist axiom that “the personal is political” in the context of the World Wide Web and, by extension, in the context of our contemporary information economy. Digital technologies have profoundly altered the relationship between the personal (as specific, lived, material, and embodied experience) and political economy, and the consequences of that alteration are as visible in the conclusions Maxmin & Zuboff draw about the shift from mass production and consumption to individuated production and consumption in The Support Economy as they are in online gaming sweatshops’ transformation of individuated leisure activity into market-based profit. There’s something strange going on here, though: in conventional mainstream representations of the economy, capital is always understood to be, in the now-familiar formulation, “footloose capital.” As an impersonal, faceless (and, in many representations, uncontrollable) force, it transcends the material boundaries of nations, cultures, and bodies. Even as neoclassical economists and their fellow travelers discursively construct an economy driven by ostensibly individual tastes and values, the metaphors they choose — pareto curves and aggregate geometries — immediately abstract the personal into the general. However, they only do this for capital: in the immaterial and abstracted “space of flows” described by Manuel Castells, it’s capital that flows, not labor.

Not bodies.

In the mainstream discourse of economic globalization, the commonplace understanding is that abstracted capital transcends all boundaries, while material and embodied individuals transcend no boundaries. Labor, as bodies, cannot flow across borders. Certainly, it migrates, but only in a disembodied fashion: an absence here is a presence there, and the mobility of capital moves poverty and exploitation from place to place, but the people themselves do not move. The labor of individual bodies is in many ways regulated (consider the ongoing American debate about immigration), and in some ways circumscribed by its own materiality and individuation.

So what happens when we examine these ideas in the context of the writing classroom? Do first-year writing teachers, in some ways, seek to keep the personal and the material outside the classroom door? And what does that mean for the political economy of the composition classroom?

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Immaterial and Abstracted?

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

In Terms of Work for Composition, Bruce Horner notes that “one argument made against teaching ‘on-line’ is that the process of placing coursework on-line not only restructures that work, allowing for greater control and scrutiny of faculty performance and course content and intensifying the work of teaching, but it also better enables institutions to claim ownership of those materials and take possession of faculty’s knowledge and course design skill embodied in the course materials” (6). There’s a lot embedded in this quotation: Walter Benjamin’s argument about reproducibility restructuring schemata of value, relationships of exploitation in academia, and concerns of ownership. But the most important argument here is one that’s familiar to any scholar familiar with the work of Lawrence Lessig: the digital technology of copying — of reproducibility — profoundly alters relationships between creator and consumer, between maker and remaker, between the original source, the mix, and the remix — and its subsequent derivations. It makes the individual and personal expertise of the teacher public and claimable.

Contrast this to the conventional classroom situation in which, according to Horner, “the student’s self […] is imagined as fixed, uniform, and autonomous, even when it remains inaccessible to the student, rather than being seen as socially produced, the site of struggle between official and practical consciousness played out in the material process of writing” (40). Here, in the first context Horner describes, the classroom “is imagined” as a neutral, abstract space, as is the persona of the student. The second context Horner describes is an attempt to imagine that classroom context for the embodied student as more material and concrete. What happens, though, when we attempt to apply either context to the “online” scenario described above? For Horner, in either case, the (necessarily material, particular, and concrete) act of placing a text (a class, an essay) online seems to result in its increasing abstraction. The text, in Horner’s eyes, enters the online equivalent of the utopian no-space Joseph Harris critiques as the uselessly abstracted “discourse community.” And here I return to the point I recently made: that abstracted online utopian no-space, in the discourse of composition, is figured both as “the economy” and as “the classroom.” The three are not congruent, certainly — but in the shape of the discourse that embodies them, they are unignorably isomorphic.

The problem with this, of course, is that we know from Harris, Lu, and others that the classroom is hardly an immaterial and abstracted space. The same holds true for the economy, as Gibson-Graham, Ironmonger, and others demonstrate. Why, then, does Horner suggest that the simple act of moving a text from the classroom to the Web somehow makes that text more abstracted, immaterial, and commodifiable? Is publishing the equivalent of commercialization; does placing more eyes on a text make it necessarily less material, less concrete, and therefore more easily subject to commodified market-based exchange? I don’t think so, and I think Clancy Ratliff’s research stands as strong evidence why not: from my scant understanding of some of the projects she’s worked on, Clancy’s work investigates the abstracted representations of gender roles assigned to online discourse, and proposes that such representations are largely mistaken in light of the concrete evidence of female bloggers: to be crudely reductive, Clancy proposes that in many women’s public blogging practices, the personal is indeed political (and, I’d add, material and embodied) when it goes online. The blogosphere, contra Horner, is a concretized and personal space for its users, and in its materiality and engagement is deeply and necessarily political.

My goal here is to perform the analytical about-face, and take Clancy’s insight concerning the blogosphere and apply it to the overlapping representations of the classroom and the economy. More on this soon: yes, I’m back to my practice of working through dissertation chapters on the blog, and I’m happy with where Chapter 4 is going.

CFP: Writing, Teaching, Technology

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Computers, Writing

The UMass Amherst English Department is co-sponsoring a K-college Conference on Writing, Teaching, and Technology on April 7 and 8, 2006. From the Call for Proposals:

The rapid development of computer capabilities is providing new venues for writing for people of all ages: personal web pages, web diaries, and blogs make it possible for people to write and share their work around the globe. As technology facilitates writing, it also challenges our very notion of writing. Writers can compose not only with words, but also with images and sound. Software programs are moving far beyond spell-checking; some are being marketed claiming to evaluate writing. Finally, technology also provides new opportunities for teaching writing (for example, electronic writing portfolios; software, like WebCT, that organizes courses and facilitates sharing of drafts; distanced education platforms). This conference aims to allow teachers from different backgrounds and with different interests to share methods, ideas, and projects for using technology effectively in the writing classroom.

I’m not involved with organizing the conference, but I know some of the folks who are, and it looks like this’ll be pretty cool, especially with the cross-grade-level focus. Kathleen Yancey will give the opening address, and Charles Moran will be the speaker for the closing session. If you’re within a few hours’ drive and have an interest in technology and teaching, I’m sure they’d love to see a proposal from you.

Publishing Land Mines

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers

Some good, smart people have already noted the troubling nature of a certain journal publisher’s attitude towards intellectual property, as well as the troubling nature of said publisher’s business practices. It’s rather more difficult to describe as merely “troubling” the fact that said publisher is involved in connected (via parent company Reed Elsevier; see comments below) to the international arms trade.

It might be worth thinking about the ten million land mines and eight thousand amputee children in Angola before submitting that article to Computers and Composition.

That’s Not It

preterite Class (Meta), Computers, Economics, Writing

In my dissertation’s Chapter 2, I survey composition’s broad and self-interested array of class definitions. Chapter 3 is centered around adding one more perspective on class that we don’t see much in composition: Bourdieu’s. For Bourdieu, class is overdetermined, performative, relational, and historical, and I want to argue that these four descriptors are ones that composition can ill afford to ignore, for reasons that will be apparent by the end of this post. I know I’ve recently had a lot to say about Bourdieu, but today I’m going to take a step back and take a look at Raymond Williams in order to try to set up the theoretical synthesis that I see as driving Chapter 3.

So I’ll start with some givens: first, industrial capitalism is a relatively new phenomenon. (If you were to ask me what the single most culturally significant event of the year 1776 was, my answer would be Adam Smith’s publication of The Wealth of Nations.) Second, as Marx, Williams, and many others have noted, industrial capitalism facilitates the maintenance of human divisions of classes. There is no hierarchical structure of class domination: rather, domination exists, but it is enacted as a relational process. (This is, in Distinction, Bourdieu’s fundamental insight.) Williams, like Bourdieu, sees class as overdetermined, so I’d like to return to his concerns briefly and lay some groundwork for a future further class analysis based on Bourdieu’s work. Basically, Williams traces the literary changes in the meaning of the word “culture” and argues that “the questions now concentrated in the meanings of the word culture are questions directly raised by the great historical changes which the changes in industry, democracy, and class, in their own way, represent” (Culture xiii, emphasis in original). Williams analyzes in detail the way changes wrought in culture reflect technological, economic, and societal change, asserting in Marxism and Literature that “the recognition of literature as a specializing social and historical category” stands as

decisive evidence of a particular form of the social development of language. Within its terms, work of outstanding and permanent importance was done, in specific social and cultural relationships. But what has been happening, in our own century, is a profound transformation of these relationships, directly connected with changes in the basic means of production. These changes are most evident in the new technologies of language, which have moved practice beyond the relatively uniform and specializing technology of print. The principal changes are the electronic transmission and recording of speech and of writing for speech, and the chemical and electronic and composition and transmission of images, in complex relations with speech and with writing for speech, and including images which can themselves be written. None of these means cancels print, or even diminishes its specific importance, but they are not simple additions to it, or mere alternatives. In their complex connections and interrelations they compose a new substantial practice in social language itself […]. For they are always more than new technologies, in the limited sense. They are means of production, developed in direct if complex relationships with profoundly changing and extending social and cultural relationships: changes elsewhere recognizable as deep political and economic transformations. (53-54, emphasis in original)

Much of this is familiar to technorhetoricians, those of us who deal with the intersection of writing instruction with digital technologies — but what Williams introduces is a twofold attention: first, to the means of production (both economic and cultural), and second, to technological anti-essentialist overdetermination. As Williams puts it, “The shaping influence of economic change can of course be distinguished […]. But the difficulty lies in estimating the final importance of a factor which never, in practice, appears in isolation. […] For, even if the economic element is determining, it determines a whole way of life” (280-281). In other words, the interplay of industry, technology, art, and democracy in conjunction with economy allow one to examine the result of that interplay in what Williams calls “culture.” This studied and complicated interplay is what Gibson-Graham describes as “the anti-essentialist presumption of overdetermination” (16), which “involves an understanding of identities as continually and differentially constituted rather than as pre-existing their contexts or as having an invariant core” (16).

Because I’m defining class as the overdetermined space of articulation between economy and culture, a train of necessary arguments follows: if economic change is overdetermined, having a diverse and varied core (Gibson-Graham’s point), then I must argue as well that changes in class relations — and class itself — are overdetermined, which is the unavoidable implication of the views of Williams on changes in class, and of the views of Bourdieu on class position. As the Post-Autistic Economics movement argues, we can no longer make the neoclassical error of attributing microeconomic change solely to change in the tastes and values of individuals, and we can no longer make the neoclassical error of attributing macroeconomic change to simple fluctuations in supply and demand. Williams makes the historical observation that “In industry, there was the first rejection, alike of machine-production and of the social relations embodied in the factory system. This was succeeeded by a phase of growing sentiment against the machine, as such, in isolation. Thirdly, in our own period, machine production came to be accepted, and major emphasis transferred to the problem of social relations within an industrial system of production” (Williams 296). We’ve of course seen a similar series of reactions today (consider the changing social status of the computer geek over the past twenty-five years, and the evolution of representations of computers starting with HAL 9000 and the WarGames WOPR), and Williams suggests that similar changes were taking place in the nineteenth century, leading to what he describes as a world of “mass democracy” and “mass communication” (269).

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